The Men and Women Who Moved: Tech Executives Who Moved to Another Company in the Same Field

Here are five examples of high-profile tech executives who moved and assumed a similarly ranked position at another company.

Competition in the tech industry has always been fierce, and it’s not uncommon to find
high-profile tech executives who transfer from one huge tech company to another. Some good examples are Sheryl Sandberg, who transferred from Google to Facebook; Matias Duarte, who worked for Palm and then transferred to Google; Marissa Mayer, who transferred to Yahoo after long years of working for Google; David Berman, who found himself at RingCentral years after he left WebEx; and Ray Ozzie, who jumped over to Microsoft from IBM. Read on to find out about even more about the movements.

Sheryl Sandberg has been serving as Facebook’s chief operating officer since 2008 (and is the first woman elected to its board of directors) but prior to this, she
was with Google as Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations for a
good seven years. She was responsible for launching Google’s philanthropic arm,
Google.org, and became heavily involved with Google Book Search. After being
hired away from Google by Mark Zuckerberg in 2008, Sandberg held a pivotal role
in turning Facebook into the profitable machine that it is today.

UI
designer Matias Duarte was hired as VP for Human Interface and User Experience
at Palm, Inc. in 2007 to lead the UI development of Palm’s webOS. He left the
company shortly after it was acquired by Hewlett Packard reportedly due to some
conflicts with members of his team. Rumors that he was headed to Google were
quickly confirmed and soon after, it was officially announced that he would be
joining the Mountain View giant as User Experience Director for Android. His
design influence was first seen on Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the platform’s first push into touchscreen tablet computing.

Marissa
Mayer was Google’s 20th employee and was the search giant’s first female
engineer. She was with the company for 13 years starting from 1999 and was able
to assume various key roles such as engineer, designer, product manager, and
executive. When she quit Google, she was quickly appointed as president and CEO
of Yahoo, starting her stint with major changes in personnel policy such as the
controversial issuing of a ban on telecommuting among employees. She is also
known for leading Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of microblogging site
Tumblr.

Cloud
phone systems provider RingCentral recently named former WebEx executive David
Berman as its new president. He is tasked to provide leadership in the overall
strategic direction of the company which is already eying an IPO. During his
time at WebEx, he carried the company through its acquisition by Cisco and
implemented a revolutionary web-touch sales and support model that helped the
organization gain a significant growth in terms of revenue.

Prior
to holding the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software
Architect at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie was best known for creating Lotus Notes, the
collaborative client-server software platform of IBM. After his stint at IBM,
he formed Groove Networks, which was later acquired by Microsoft and evolved to
become SharePoint. Heralded as one of the world’s best programmers, Ozzie
stepped down from his position at Microsoft in 2010 and went on to create a
secretive startup called Cocomo (recently renamed as Talko) reportedly involved
in building cloud-based back end services.

Can you name more tech executives who moved to another company? Tell us in the
comments section below.

Nancy Perkins, a full-time mommy wannabe, has been a freelance online writer for two years now. She loves sharing information on health, business, technology, fashion, women's issues and motherhood. Nancy lives life to its fullest each day and
is dreaming of retiring on an island she will someday own.